Tampa, SCOTUS, Thune, Daniels, and Vanishing Leads
Looks like we are going to Tampa in 2012. Hugh Hewitt spent a lot of time last night complaining about the weather in Tampa in August, which would indeed be better in Salt Lake City, one of the other cities in the running until yesterday. One thing is for sure, while holding the convention in SLC would have been problematic for Romney, this is not true:
Mitt Romney is a Mormon and many think the GOP isn’t going to want to highlight Mormonism in Utah during the convention.
Come on – that presumes a Romney nomination – far from a done deal. There was a Salon blog post along the same lines that strikes as extraordinarily poor writing for an outlet like Salon. (We make no claim to be great writers here)
The other two sites in the running, after all, were Salt Lake City and Phoenix. Salt Lake City would have seemed risky for the GOP — Mitt Romney, after all, may well be their presidential nominee. And Romney, like many of the residents of Salt Lake, is Mormon. The church’s headquarters and holy places are all over downtown. Did Republicans really want to have thousands of reporters taking tours of Temple Square with young missionaries in between political speeches and writing about the quirkier elements of the church’s theology? (Romney, when he ran for president in 2008, kept a low profile when he went to Utah for the funeral of the church’s leader.) Besides that, Salt Lake is 80 percent white, which would actually mean the Republican convention might add diversity to the population.
But if you want to find a reason why the GOP rejected SLC, you might think about Bob Bennett. Why should the party reward a state that rejected one of its stalwarts? But there is more…
…Bennett Rejection Fall-out
The religiously-based attacks on Romney continue:
But unless you were there you wouldn’t have noticed that when Bennett took the podium, he was given a rousing intro by Mitt Romney. There in the land of Mormons, where respect of the elders is elementary, Romney paid homage to the elder. And the crowd turned away from Bennett and from Romney.
Which is interesting because another 2012 possible, John Thune, defended Bennett. Which is interesting because…
…Thune was in the News
Not to mention, a distant possible Mitch Daniels got a little press too.
And I wonder if Whitman’s slip in California is part of the same mindset that nailed Bennett. If it is, its not too bright. Poisner is far more centrist, even liberal, than Whitman. He is running a campaign pretty far at odds with his record of governance.
SCOTUS
So what about Kagan? Well, her nomination means there are no Protestants on the court. Do I care? Not really, but I think it is instructive. I think it is symptomatic of the same phenomena that makes Evangelicals seem like such a potent political force, but rarely effective. Most issues of Evangelical concern are based in the courts, you would think if we really cared, we’d be breeding justices.
Although leading protestant legal force Jay Sekulow is asking the right questions about the Kagan nomination. And his blogging counterpoint, Barry Lynn seems to agree – strange bedfellows indeed.
Other Stuff…
The National Day of Prayer discussion continues. I hate to say this, but I agree with Kathleen Parker’s thesis, even if her argument for it is garbage. The issue is not belief, but the perception that the government is endorsing some specific form, object, or understanding of prayer.
Thinking about where the Tea Party and the Religious Right part company. The former is fiscal, the later social – but the left cannot seem to tell them apart.
Which makes this extended piece on how, “The Left’s political zealotry increasingly resembles religious experience,” quite interesting. One of the primary thesis of this blog is that tying religion and political stances too tightly generally results in politics subsuming genuine spiritual experiences. It has happened on the left. We should guard against it on the Right or religion is gone completely.
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Any reporters who visited Temple Square would find a diverse group of “young missionaries” who are from Mormon populations around the world, from Africa to Asia to Europe to Latin America, and are ready to take them on tours and answer their questions in Spanish, Portuguese, German, Swedish, French, Russian, Ukrainian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Mongolian, Tagalog, Tongan, and several other languages. If they walked over to the Church Office Building they would find people from many countries working in Church administration, translation services, multi-lingual records, and family history research. If they came during one of the semi-annual General Conferences of the church, they would see leaders from over 100 countries in attendance. And if they got in their cars and drive to Provo’s Missionary Training Center an hour to the south, they would see thousands of young men and women, and many older couples, learning one of 90 languages preparatory to living one to two years, at their own expense, in those nations.
It would be nice if the idiots who make those stereotyped comments about Mormons actually got off their duffs and went out to see the Mormons instead of fantasizing about them in a manner that amounts to navel-gazing introspection rather than observation of objective reality. Heck, if they just opened up Mormon.org they would be able to see most of this stuff. But where religion is concerned, and Mormonism in particular, most people don’t think that learning anything about it is a prerequisite to pronouncing judgment on it.
Should the population of Utah reflect the diverse population of the worldwide LDS Church? During the 19th Century, when the Church was small, it actively encouraged converts to gather to the center of Church population, to help reach critical mass that could support creating cities in the wilderness, and building temples and other projects like BYU. But since the middle of the 20th Century, Church leaders have encouraged members to stay in their homelands and build a foundation for the Church in each nation. There are still lots of international members who go to BYU and end up sticking around, but if all 13.8 million Mormons moved to Utah, it would increase the state’s population by 400%.